Customer Service Strategy in Housing

I’d like to talk about the customer service strategy that we can use for housing. First of all, every somebody leaves, every time you have a churn, the cost is very expensive. I happen to own a lot of rental properties. Let me tell you, it’s about $1,200 every time somebody leaves. If I can create this better customer service experience, that means I got to have speed. When somebody has a problem, I got to be able to take care of it now. I got to treat them like a king, like a queen. I got to treat everybody special. I have to use the customer’s name, make them feel special on a very consistent basis.

If you do that in housing, you can get customers to come back. You can get people to give you more money. It’s really not a complicated process. Every employee you have has to be able to make empowered decisions. If somebody has something that needs to be fixed and your technician is there, you want him to be able to do it instead of saying, “I’m sorry, sir. That’s going to be $45,” or “I’m sorry, sir. That’s going to be $200 and I have to get approval first before I can do it.”

If you have over-happy customers, nobody can take your customers. They stay. You make a lot more money. Without empowerment, this won’t happen. That means that the employee at the point of contact has to be able to make fast decisions. Then we have to train and educate everybody so that they deliver this incredible customer experience. There’s no magic program that you can buy from Service Quality Institute or any company that you can dip your employees in and bingo, they’re going to be perfect for life.

Again, you can go to any educational system for the rest of your entire life. There’s not one course anywhere that’s going to teach your employees the skills and the art of customer service. If you want customer-driven employees, you want to own the market, you want to crush your competition, you want to grow faster than anybody else, then it’s your responsibility to build and develop your employees with something new and fresh virtually every four months.

Thank you.

Look at Leading Empowered Teams to see how I can help you improve the customer service strategy in your housing facility.